A Standards-Compliant Publishing Tool for the Rest of Us?

The development community, the independent content community, and
especially webloggers, are familiar with Six Apart’s Movable Type, a
robust and popular publishing tool designed to faciliate the creation
of blogs. Lately the community has been buzzing about a
soon-to-be-released Six Apart product intended to deliver the power
of personal publishing to an even wider, non-expert user base.

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What has not been told until now is that TypePad has been designed to
generate standards-compliant sites, and that the application itself
is built with web standards. A List Apart’s publisher and creative
director Jeffrey Zeldman caught up with Six
Apart’s Anil Dash to find out more.

We’re thrilled that you’ve chosen A List Apart as the place
to announce the standards compliance part of your story. But before
we get into that, please tell us about TypePad. What does it do, and
who is it for?

TypePad is a personal publishing service that combines easy tools for
creating weblogs, photo blogs, photo albums, and all the other pieces
of a full-featured personal website with hosting and maintenance and
updates of the software. Because the whole system is designed to work
by just signing up and diving in, we’re anticipating it being
extremely popular with beginners, but it will range in features all
the way up to its highest tier, which includes nearly all of Movable
Type’s functionality, except for the ability to customize the
application’s code.

Aside from improved standards compliance, which we’ll get
into a bit later, how does TypePad differ from other web publishing
tools and weblog services, including your company’s popular Movable
Type product? Standards aside, how does it differ from the non-Six
Apart products out there?

The key thing that differentiates TypePad is that it’s designed to
not require any setup or configuration, or any focus on anything
except the ideas you’re sharing. In the case of Movable Type, TypePad
is differentiated by not needing to be installed on your server. In
the case of other weblog tools, TypePad is differentiated by not
needing the user to manually integrate Javascript or HTML for basic
features like comments, categories, TrackBack, blogrolls or
statistics.

TypePad’s press materials state that the product is
specifically designed for webloggers and similar personal site
creators. We’ll bite: in what special ways does TypePad meet those
content producers’ needs?

The advantage we had in creating TypePad was getting to start, around
the middle of last year, at a time when the formats themselves were
relatively defined, and we could work backwards from the way weblogs
exist in order to make the tool work to suit the appropriate tasks.
We’ve seen lots of people who are signed up for three, four, or five
different services, each with their own password, just to manage
their weblog, blogroll, comments, and statistics. And then on top of
that, they’re forced to manually integrate those pieces with little
pieces of Javascript inserted into inscrutable places in the markup
for their templates. For web developers, this is all trivial. For my
mom, it’s just not even in the realm of possibility. So TypePad gives
those basic users the tools to manage all those pieces right in the
interface, while allowing advanced users to still get in and
customize it as they’d expect to.

Does this focus on the needs of bloggers mean that the tool
would not help other kinds of content creators and site owners and
developers? For instance, would TypePad be a poor choice for a
school, church, or other small organization that is looking for an
affordable content management system that supports web standards? (If
it is a poor choice, what might they use instead?)

TypePad would probably only be used by very small organizations which
were primarily focused on updating the news on their site. It’s
likely to fit the “church newsletter” market pretty well, but it’s
not designed to build a full brochureware site, even though there are
some fairly nice tools for managing the static parts of your site. We
think it’s more likely that small businesses get help with their
sites from consultants, either paid or voluntary friend-of-a-friend
experts working on building their sites. And to those developers,
Movable Type is already the most popular choice. It does generate
standards-compliant markup by default, and we plan to improve the
semantics of the default templates even more in our upcoming releases.

Okay. Tell us about standards compliance in TypePad. From
glancing at the limited materials Six Apart has so far made available, my sense is that with this product even a novice could
publish a weblog built with valid XHTML and CSS. Is that correct? If
so, how does it work?

TypePad does allow users at any level to choose from a library of
fully compliant XHTML/CSS templates. Even better, they can use the built-in
visual template builder to choose which pieces of information to
display on a page, drag and drop them within the app to rearrange
them on the page, and then just hit save and the application will
generate the appropriate markup for them automatically. At the
advanced level, we have the full templating system that current
Movable Type users are familiar with, and all the power and potential
that our users keep surprising us with is there. But the part that
keeps enticing us is that users don’t have to choose from pre-built
templates, they can make their own, either starting from scratch or
by basing it on one of the ones that come with the app, and still
have a fully validating page when they’re done with the process.

Does Six Apart provide users with standards-compliant
templates? If so, who designed those?

Every template in TypePad will be standards-compliant markup by
default. We haven’t finalized the number of pre-built templates yet,
but because the template builder lets people create their own, the
total number is essentially limitless. All of the built-in ones are
designed by Mena Trott, who designed the default Movable Type
templates that people seem very happy with, along with sites like her
own Dollarshort.org and Gizmodo, a Movable Type-powered weblog about
gadgets. Interestingly, she also designed the Currency template,
which seems to have been adopted as an option by nearly every weblog
publishing tool that exists, so it appears that even the users of our
competitors’ products like her design sense.

Why is it important to Six Apart to create a tool that
generates valid markup, styles, and code? What is the benefit to
users of TypePad and to people who visit TypePad-generated sites?

At a fundamental level, the web standards story is about access.
Giving browser developers access to the market. Giving readers with
disabilities access to information. Giving users of any platform
access to the sites that matter to them. So there’s a strong sense
that we’re making pages generated in TypePad represent what
weblogging is about in general, a level playing field for
information, a sort of democratization of publishing. From a personal
standpoint, I think we’re all just a little bit neurotic and
compulsive enough that the “correctness” of valid markup appeals to
us, too, though I suspect we’re supposed to present that as us being
a detail-oriented organization.

In a larger sense, we have two big goals for TypePad’s output. We
want to enable even the least technologically-savvy user to
participate in the benefits of advanced technology. Someday soon
(Yea, verily, I believe!) there will be benefits to generating
semantically-valid markup that validates as XHTML. And those are
benefits that shouldn’t be conferred only on the technically elite.
Indeed, they’ll be less interesting benefits if those are the only
users who see them. But we’re also interested in quality. We say
often that we don’t just want a lot of weblogs to use Typepad, we
want them to be quality weblogs. And page quality is a reflection
of the site itself, we believe. There’s a sense of craftsmanship to a
well-made web page just as there is to the solidity of a chair made
by an expert carpenter. So maybe that’s some invisible aesthetic
decision, but we think that it’s important and that it influences the
quality of writing, design, and expression on the site itself.

Basically, we want our pages to be valid so that they’re accessible
to the largest possible audience. And we want that broadness of
accessibility to be a motivator for people to do justice to the
breadth of their audience in terms of the quality of the ideas they
express using our tools.

If the user creates his or her own template, and that
template is not standards-compliant, what happens? Does TypePad
magically fix such problems?

We fully support the right of our advanced users to be as depraved as
they need to be. The basic and intermediate level template builders
actually don’t allow invalid markup to be created. Advanced users are
given the Peter Parker admonition: With great power comes great
responsibility. As much as we advocate web standards, we’re not
zealots about it, and we know that people have different needs.
Besides, we’ve seen the reaction that advanced users of word
processors have to auto-correction, and we’re not really eager to get
into the dancing paperclip level of authoritarianism over our users.

You’ve told me that TypePad is standards-compliant inside and
out. In other words, not only does it generate standards-compliant
sites, you claim that the tool itself is built with web standards.
Please explain.

First, I’ll explain what inside and out means to us for TypePad.
TypePad is designed to be a large scale, commercially available web
application and publishing service, and every page in the application
(minus any beta bugs we’re still working through right now) is valid
XHTML. Movable Type was one of the earliest tools to generate XHTML
by default for output, but the application itself reflects markup
that, while good for its mid-2001 vintage, isn’t ideal. TypePad is,
as far as we know, the first major web tool where we walk the walk
for the program. We chose an XHTML 1.0 Transitional DOCTYPE, due to
our requirements for scripting in the application. Our input and
output formats are valid XML, and our positioning, layout, and
styling are all described through valid CSS.

Second, TypePad is designed to encourage the creation of
standards-compliant web pages by making it automatic wherever
possible and easy everywhere else. Output pages are also valid XHTML
and CSS.

Why was it important to Six Apart to build this product with
web standards? What are you trying to prove?

Interestingly, TypePad’s status as standards-compliant wasn’t an
articulated decision within the company. It’s just the way we all
build pages by default, because it’s that much faster and that much
easier to make work across platforms. So we never had a “should we do
this in valid markup?” discussion; that’s just the only sensible
development path, as far as we’re concerned. There was no advocacy
component to it, it’s just the reality of having a development team
that lives on multiple platforms and browsers. For example, primary
development of TypePad was done for months on Mac OS X, and when
Safari came out, except for known bugs in that browser, TypePad just
worked. When I joined the company a few months ago, I finally got to
really play with the application on Internet Explorer for Windows and
Mozilla Firebird, my preferred browsers, and it just worked. I think
we may have spent a few minutes dealing with IE’s box model
weirdness, but cross-browser functionality testing was on the order
of minutes, not even hours.

That’s not to say that our support for web standards is accidental or
incidental, of course. I was a member of The Web Standards Project
before I joined Six Apart, and the company has been nothing but
supportive of my presence there, and strongly encourages my
participation. For a while, we were a three person company, so they
were essentially comfortable saying that one third of their human
resources could focus on web standards as a priority. I don’t know of
many other companies with that level of commitment to open standards.

Will the underlying standards-compliant code in TypePad, its
standards-compliant output, and its special weblog-oriented features
find their way into Movable Type at some point in the future?

We absolutely plan to bring every TypePad feature into Movable Type
that we can. There are some limitations due to the fact that Movable
Type is distributed and runs on a huge variety of different
platforms. But the large-scale improvements that we got from
developing TypePad will definitely surface in Movable Type and our
upcoming Movable Type Pro release.

When these standards and these new, blogger-oriented features
make their way into Movable Type, how should potential users decide
which product, TypePad or Movable Type, is best for their needs? In
other words, who will want one and who might prefer the other?

There’s a very simple way to decide whether TypePad or Movable Type
are right for you. Movable Type is designed for businesses and power
users who are comfortable managing their own servers and installing
applications on them, or who have a need for customizing the code of
the application itself. TypePad is designed for everyone else: basic
to advanced users who want to focus on publishing their words,
photos, and ideas without managing or installing any software.

Why should web producers interest themselves in products from
a small company like Six Apart? Shouldn’t they wait for a more
respectable product from a bigger company like Macromedia or even
Microsoft?

Well, it depends on what they’re trying to achieve. We certainly work
very well with tools from those companies, so perhaps the question
isn’t deciding between them, but in choosing how they’ll work
together. We’ve been very fortunate to have a good number of people
inside Macromedia using our publishing tools, which we think
complement their applications very well. And even Microsoft has
created a blogging plug-in for their Windows Media Player, which can
work with third-party applications that support our APIs to publish
things like a “Now Playing” list to your weblog. So we see that as a
validation from these big players that, just as we support their
platforms, they support ours.

At a fundamental level, we think that part of what makes TypePad
compelling to a lot of writers is the idea that you can have your own
site and have control of publishing in a way that’s not controlled
by a large corporation, or one of the giant media conglomerates.
That’s not to say that those aren’t also valid and important media
outlets, but we’ve seen that people like having a choice of both.
Plus, I think everyone tends to prefer small companies when it comes
to responsiveness and in valuing their customers.

Does Microsoft’s recent announcement that they will no longer
upgrade Internet Explorer outside of an upcoming OS version that also
includes Digital Rights Management, coupled with the announcement by
AOL that it is likely to use IE6 instead of its own Netscape browser
for the next seven years, in any way make you question Six Apart’s
commitment to web standards?

Not at all. As mentioned earlier, our commitment to web standards
comes from purely pragmatic reasons when developing our tools. No
matter what future directions any of the browser or platform vendors
go in, there are still hundreds of millions of machines and devices
that we want to ensure are able to access the TypePad application
and, more importantly, the sites that our users create with it. In
fact we think the continuing evolution of these huge companies’
policies towards their browser and rendering efforts act as even more
of a confirmation of the importance of web standards: platforms,
tools, and technologies might change, but the only thing that ensures
your words are still visible to the web are these standards.

What else should we know about TypePad, Movable Type, or Six Apart?

TypePad coming soon! Honest! We’ve just been thrilled that so many
people are interested in trying it out, and we’d encourage anyone who
wants to check out typepad.com to sign up for the mailing
list, as that’s where we’ll be picking beta testers from. Movable
Type is going to see a huge number of benefits from our work on
TypePad, both in support for their common APIs and in improvements
that’ll be reflected back from TypePad to Movable Type and Movable
Type Pro. And regarding Six Apart, I’d say that the biggest thing
people should know is that we appreciate how very much our users have
contributed to our work, and that there’s still so much to do yet,
for all of us. So do go and tell people about weblogs, about TypePad.

We all tend to think everyone knows about these things, but they’re
just in their infancy, and we haven’t yet seen the potential of a
truly huge global network of linked personal publishing efforts. Of
course, we’re hoping that our tools are the best and that will make
people choose them, but the most important thing is that people
understand the potential of the medium, and that it doesn’t have to
be confusing or complicated. In short, spread the word!

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